Nucflash

PROLOGUE

“Attention, attention. British Airways Flight Twenty-eight from Hong Kong, now arriving Gate Three… ”

Pak Chong Yong stepped off the boarding ramp, following the line of his fellow passengers into the waiting lounge in London’s Heathrow International Airport. He wore an expensive three-piece suit, with five-hundred-dollar shoes, and carried a leather attaché case for the respectability it afforded him. There was respectability too in his companion, the attractive Korean woman next in line behind him. After almost fifteen hours aboard the 744, Chun Hyon Hee’s pink and white business suit was rumpled, but no more so than the clothing of the others aboard Flight 28. It was not yet five in the morning, local time. The sky, visible through the big windows in one wall of the waiting lounge, was still dark, though touched by streaks of a cold, predawn light.

Filing up to the customs gate with the other disembarking passengers, both kept their faces impassive. This would be their first and possibly their most dangerous test…

“Passports, please. You two traveling together?”

“Yes, sir.”

His English was perfect. The passport he surrendered to the customs official at the gate gave his name as Kim Doo Ok, a vice president of marketing for the Seoul-based Daewan International Corporation. His companion’s passport listed her as Madam Kim Song Hee, since their control for this operation had felt they would be safer traveling together as husband and wife. Chun, like Pak, was a member of the People’s Eighth Special Operations Corps.

“Business or pleasure?”

Pak allowed his face to crease in an unaccustomed smile. “A little of both, sir. I have business for my company… but we thought we would combine it with a small vacation.”

“ ’At’s the ticket.” After a cursory inspection of their papers, Pak’s briefcase, and Chun’s carry-on bag, the blue-uniformed official stamped their passports, smiled brightly, and handed them back with a cheerful, “Have a nice stay in England, Mr. and Mrs. Kim!”

“Thank you. We will.”

Beyond the bottleneck of the customs gate they stopped momentarily, until the jostle of people from behind forced the two of them to step aside, suddenly uncertain. Neither of them had ever been to Heathrow before, and the bustle of people was as confusing and as noisy as Hong Kong or Tokyo, and far more alien. Pak felt a shiver of xenophobia, quickly suppressed. His training in covert operations, relentless, grueling, and long, had included outings and maneuvers in several Western cities, and for a time he’d been assigned to Operation Suwi — Watchman — in New York City. He didn’t like Western cities, however, and knew he would never get used to them… or their mongrel-yapping, contentious, and ill-disciplined people.

The corridors, coldly lit by fluorescent lighting panels overhead, were actually not that crowded. Most of the people milling about beyond the customs gate were waiting for passengers arriving on British Air 28. Their contact ought to be here somewhere…

“Mr. Kim?”

Pak turned, eyes narrowed to hard slits in his round face. The man approaching him from the back of pay phones to the right had a seedy look to him, and his breath stank of too many hours in the airport’s bar.

“I’m Kim.”

“Long flight?”

“Not so bad. The service was good anyway.”

“Glad to hear it. Things ain’t what they used to be, flying.” The formalities of sign and countersign concluded, the man stuck out his hand. “I’m O’Malley.”

Pak ignored the hand. “Is there someplace more private? I dislike meeting in the open, like this.”

“Ssst!” the man hissed. He glanced back and forth, his too-expressive face revealing his fear. “Keep it down, willya? Ain’t seen no Sassmen about, but that don’t mean they ain’t there. C’mon.”

Pak exchanged a glance with Chun. That was the problem with ops requiring cooperation with oegugin… the hated foreigners. More often than not, they were poorly trained and poorly disciplined, and they nearly always betrayed more concern for their personal safety than for the completion of the mission.

Pak would be glad when this mission was done and he could return to Pyongyang.

“That’s O’Malley all right,” the British airport security chief said. “But who’re the two gooks?”

Colonel Wentworth glanced up from the television monitor. The Security Office was a clean, close room filled with banks of monitors and a number of security men, but the three of them — Wentworth, the security chief, and the man in the dark suit whose ID had marked him as a special agent with MI5—had this corner of the room to themselves, and no one else was within earshot.

“Their passports are for a Mr. and Mrs. Kim,” Wentworth replied. “But I wouldn’t place too much faith in that. Our people are checking with Daewan International now, but I expect they’ll check out okay. The opposition’s pretty careful about things like that.”

The security chief reached for a white telephone. “So. Shall I call my people in and pick ’em up?”

“Negative,” Wentworth said. He was wearing a headset and could hear the terse back-and-forth reports of the troopers on the ground, a reassuring background murmur of voices and code phrases. “My men are already on it. Let’s not spook them with uniforms, okay?”

“Listen, Colonel, O’Malley’s a known terr. A damned bloody Provo. If he does somethin’ loopy on the concourse, it’s me job, see?”

“O’Malley’s not a problem,” Wentworth said. “He’s not carrying, and his backup stayed outside the security check zone. My guess is he just went in to pick up the two Koreans.”

“Well, your guess had damned sure better be a good one.”